[.ca] Where I Was From (ISBN 0679433325)

more about Didion than about California:
I think most of the reviewers have missed the point -- this book is not about California, it's about Didion. If you read her novels, the central character is always a woman looking for home and safety and innocence -- Maria in "Play it as it lays" dreams about "the way light strikes filled Mason jars on a windowsill" and brushing her daughter's hair, and Lily in "Run, River" likes to remember waking early on a summer morning and running barefoot through the sprinklers, etc. This longing for home/safety/innocence is the lifetime obsession of certain people (usually women, but not always), and this obsession is EXACTLY the same, whether you're from Sacramento or St. Louis or Syracuse. But the people who lose their home/safety/innocence are the ones who ruthlessly jettison the past (like the California pioneers she denigrates), who abandon people and places without a backward glance. Like Didion did, when she left California and moved to New York City and became a famous journalist. If she had stayed in Sacramento and married a local boy and spent years canning peaches in Mason jars and brushing her daughter's hair, she wouldn't have a subject to write about. Her novels and her nonfiction always tell the same story: I had a sweet innocent life, I ruthlessly left it, now I'm adrift in the big bad world, and I can't get back. It's about her lost innocence, not California's.

Geography, Genealogy, Generations and the Great Divide:
Californians think they're special. There is no doubt about that. The first thing a native will tell you upon introduction is how many generations their family has been here. They don't do that in Boston -- where old families know they're old families and don't really give a damn if you know it or not. They don't do that in DC, New York or Toronto. But they do it in California. Those who have been here awhile will tell you exactly how many generations a long while is. Didion's book is filled with that brand of smugness - the one-upmanship of who's been here longer. Personally, I don't care. I don't mean to be too harsh on the book, though, for on another level this is a story not of geography or genealogy but of a generation - the generation born in the mid-to-late 1930s - too young to remember the Depression but old enough to remember the way America "used to be." My parents are from that same generation, and Didion bears a resemblence to a cousin. My grandparents are of the same generation as Didion's parents. Like them, we also have a family graveyard (ours is still in the family, still accepting members). And my father was an aerospace worker who lamented how things changed in his 42 years on the job, happy to now be retired. I mention all this because "Where I Was From" had its greatest impact on me not as a depiction of the changes in the Golden State, but as a depiction of how a family ages, of how the older generations pass over the Great Break of the grave and the Great Divide of death. While it may feel true that the land is yours only after you bury your dead in it, underlying much of this book is a sadness that this may not be enough, that not even the graves of the elders shall be respected with the passage of time - that graveyards will be sold, driven over, dug up. That progress will efface all markers. In retrospect there appears to have been no redemption for passing over the Great Plains. Perhaps there will be or will not be a redemption after passing through the grave. There is here an acceptance of the possibility that all is meaningless; and I was left with the impression that the title is facing the wrong direction. Perhaps it is not so much "Where I Was From" but "Where I Was Going." The promised land of the Golden State may prove to be nothing other than a hustler's illusion, there for the masses to devour only to enrich those who in turn will become the Disillusioned.

Wonderful book for a Summer read:
As a California historian and author of "Southern California Miscellany" I am particular about books written from an insider's point of view. This book fills the gaps often left by writers who do not know of which they speak. The author is definitley an insider who has all the best details down in print along with an entertaining story. This is a wonderful book to read while on vacation.

Where I Was From:
The latest from Didion is a complex and challenging memoir, difficult to enter into but just as difficult to put down. It manifests Didion's continued interest in social disorder and unrest, the "telling detail," and how the personal and the social intertwine. On one level, this is a very personal story of Didion's family's history that starts with the birth of her great-times-five grandmother on the Virginia frontier in 1766. On another, it is a critique of American ideals of independence and the story of how the settling of California-and the character of the original settlers-led inexorably to the California of today. Didion is an acclaimed novelist, screenwriter, and journalist who has written numerous articles, essays, and reviews. Those who have long admired the clarity and precision of her prose will not be disappointed with this partly autobiographical, partly historical, but fully engrossing account. Suitable for academic libraries and most public libraries, this is of particular interest to genealogists and American history collectors and is essential for libraries in California.

Not the whole picture:
Didion writes in her characteristic style -- the clear, hesitant sentences that are reminiscent of James Baldwin. And, as usual, she tells a story behind a story, here about how the golden promise of California was often based on illusion, on schemes that enriches outsiders at the expense of the suckers who came to the state looking for a better life. Mixed in with all this is the story of her own family (the sophisticated New Yorker started life as a Sacramento girl). So why only three stars? For me, as is often the case with this writer, I felt that she was straining to make a negative point, putting the worst spin on everything. Any time you devote a good chunk of a short book to the story of kids who turn to gang violence and drugs you're going to make a place look bad. Her limited focus on prison construction and other ideas that fail to bring in the promised wealth to locals overlooks the industries that have helped make the state rich, such homegrown enterprises as the wine growing of Napa, the silicon and software farms of Silicon Valley and, oddly enough, Hollywood (odd, because Didion has written so many screenplays herself). All of these industries -- along with the state's once-vaunted school system, the University of California, the highways, etc. -- may be shadows of their former selves. But Didion refuses to find reasons for hope even in the natural beauty of the place, which is surely without rival in this country. The book is instructive about some of the underlying reasons for California's tough times and surely helps to deglamorize the place, but it ain't the whole story.